The Master Of Bad Timing

Up here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), most folks I know think Rep. Steve Lynch is a decent enough skin -- wrong on choice, rather Blue Doggish on other issues, but strong on the working class bread-and-butter stuff. Alas for Lynch, he seems to have the timing of a goat on ice skates.

On a day on which the White House announced that eight million people had signed up for insurance through the Affordable Care Act, and in a week in which polls on that issue seemed to be turning around so much that there was active talk that the Republicans may have staked too much on that one issue, Lynch talks to our plucky little tabloid's toy radio station to sound what appears to be a rapidly superannuating alarm.

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It's now becoming pat to say this, but Democratic politicians in this year's elections should run on their support for the law -- if, for no other reason, than the fact that the Republicans are going to hang the ACA around their necks anyway. They should hammer hard on the indecency of the Republican governors who, out of rancid ideological meanness, refuse FREE MONEY (!) to provide their poor people with health care, especially now that people are starting to die for the lack of it. There should be ad after ad of people who demonstrate the sheer relief of not having to worry about choose between sick children or hungry children. Those dozens of votes to repeal the ACA should be illustrated by dozens of people in commercials who have pre-existing conditions, or dozens of young people, looking for work in a bad economy, who can stay on their parents's health plans until they get settled. This is the kind of things that disarmed the opposition to health-care reform in Massachusetts -- a concerted advertising campaign to put a happy face on the new system, with a slogan that doubled its entendres just enough to appeal to a modern audience. "I got it," said the guy on the bike. "I'm going to get it," said the woman jogger. And everybody laughed and went back to watching the Sox game. What worked here can work in the country. And you're going to have to defend it anyway, so you might as well have fun doing it.